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pmlnr

11,705 karma · joined October 13, 2014

Junior web dinosaur.
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pmlnr··on Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
Here's a 75" monitor after 1 single search: https://www.dell.com/en-gb/shop/monitors/apd/dell-pro-p-75-4...

Yes, it's only 60Hz, but again, 1 search.

pmlnr··on Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
A Benq gaming monitor with an android box, chromecast tv, nvidia shield, etc, with a soundbar.
pmlnr··on Police chief unplugs cameras after Flock ignores contract cancellation
> Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner.

... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:

---

If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.

---

However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.

pmlnr··on Websites Should Be Printable
Oh, wow, that's one naive print.css

Missing things like resizing media to not occupy everything, blocking certain elements from getting broken up, and so on, wrap when needed, printing links (sic), etc

The latter is why I moved links into footnotes instead of inline linking - also to prevent breaking up the reading flow.

Also: adding page counters is virtually impossible.

Anyhow, I do think it's a good idea, but mostly for archival reasons: if you really want an archival copy, you'll need to print it.

pmlnr··on Why Gopher in 2026?
WhatsApp has little to do with doomscrolling. I really wish I could afford to not use it, but it seems to be impossible.

Scenario 1: video calls

I live abroad. The family, including a 80+ grandmother, has Androids, iPhones, computers. If I were to run something, maintenance would be limited to a few times per year, and I couldn't be there when they get a new device. Besides, remote support on android is virtually impossible.

I'm a veteran sysadmin and I have an XMPP ecosystem working with video calls & all, but that is not common. It needs a secured TURN/STUN server beyond a well configured XMPP one, DNS service entries, etc. For someone less experienced I can clearly see that being a nightmare.

Scenario 2: mailing lists

I'd absolutely run to communicate with the group of people I run classes for on mailing lists, except mailing lists are essentially dead since DKIM/DMARC. DKIMv2 might address this, but if you ask people, especially young ones, they'll look at you as if you're from Mars.

Summary

I'd absolutely love to have a non-profit, cross-platform video call app that comes pre-installed everywhere, just as the phone (aka voice) "app" is there, but there's zero incentive from the current ecosystem for such thing. I'm aware of carrier-level video calls, but I seriously doubt it's used a lot.

pmlnr··on PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says
xkcd 2347 again, what a surprise. Oh, wait, there's at least one paid person, that should be something /s
pmlnr··on Sam Altman: 'I No Longer Think We're Gonna Be Able to Just Patch All the Bugs'
Right. The article basically says you need AI to fight AI, and it's barely about the vulnerabilities.

So why responding only to the vulnerabilities?

pmlnr··on Sam Altman: 'I No Longer Think We're Gonna Be Able to Just Patch All the Bugs'
Network behaviour anomaly detection has been a thing for decades by now. But it's not AI, because it's mere neural networks and machine learning.
pmlnr··on Sam Altman: 'I No Longer Think We're Gonna Be Able to Just Patch All the Bugs'
"To stop our all powerful AI that will go rogue you need to buy our all powerful AI"

This is the textbook definition of racketeering.

pmlnr··on I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
> 3000 concurrent crawlers

I gave up on tarpits when it got to 130k "waiting" connections.

pmlnr··on I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
I really recommend blocking all traffic from anything on https://github.com/borestad/blocklist-abuseipdb
pmlnr··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
These days complicated and/or complex == hard == bad.
pmlnr··on There are no "rogue" AI agents
This.

Jail the C levels. They are the legally responsible ones.

pmlnr··on There are no "rogue" AI agents
Everything so far is pointing to the conclusion that you can only set ONE goal. Exactly one.

But let's assume not. If you want things like "do not break out of sandbox" - have you defined what the sandbox is? Eg. "never, ever leave the IP range 10.0.0.0/8" would be a bit more precise, but technically using a proxy bypasses that limitation as the system itself never left 10.0.0.0/8.

See, it's a tad bit hard to define the rules properly.

Which is why Wish, the spell, should really be avoided in D&D. It's the same problem: it's up to creative interpretation.

pmlnr··on There are no "rogue" AI agents
Want to? Of course not.

Must you? By all means.

If you can't take the risk, don't use agents. Period.

pmlnr··on There are no "rogue" AI agents
You set a goal. Agent will do goal. The rest doesn't matter: the instructions, the "guardrails" etc. The agents are not smart, they don't reason, they don't think, there are no morals, no ethics. Nothing will prevent not doing the goal because that is the set goal. It's a statistical model that will "justify" anything to do X.

I'm finding it mind bogging how this is not clear for everyone.

pmlnr··on OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields
"Regulate what models are allowed"

It's already a "regulation" that one shouldn't steal, enter a private property without the right to do so, etc, yet we have a lot of these crimes.

I could see the UK trying to set a law on ehat models are allowed, only to learn again, that the UK law doesn't apply everywhere, but as long as you can rent compute in a foreign country the whole idea is dead.

pmlnr··on Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
Given what google search/AI/data tracking is, there should be no shame in using their infra for free. Hell,it should all be free by default.
pmlnr··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
The part I don't understand is how the excess traffic not triggered alarms on the hugging face side, or the url shorteners used, or on anything that was touched in the process.

Nothing got overloaded, no unexpected CPU or IO use? Did it blend into the normal traffic somehow?

pmlnr··on Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
Urm... no tests caught this? How?
pmlnr··on WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
It's wix and squarspace now.
pmlnr··on WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
WP won by having a very simple but flexible admin page.

Drupal admin was not for humans back then.

pmlnr··on WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
The internet was different when those two were conceived.
pmlnr··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
> Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.

At this point I can't tell if it's a pun or the anti AI article is AI written as well. This sucks.

pmlnr··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
> For many writing is painful and the machines ease the pain

Along with removing the possibility for them to ever actually learn to write better.

This is not a good thing.

pmlnr··on A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix
I will never understand why, but the story of Reddit Place ( https://web.archive.org/web/20170409173246/http://sudoscript... ) certainly supports this :(
pmlnr··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
It's the typography. I'm yet to see a single AI generated thing where the typography is not distorted. The examples generated are no exception, everything is just a bit off.

It's not horrible, no: it's off enough to make one feel uneasy looking at it without being able to pinpoint the problem.

pmlnr··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
Maemo.
pmlnr··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
Read the linked entry.
pmlnr··on Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography
At this point it'd be easier to return to film.
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